This will be part 1 in a series of articles that I AM creating on “What is Hell?”

The Sunday preacher on a hot summer day from the sweaty pulpit had said to his congregation, “Your soul is going to burn in Lake of Fire and Brimstone for all your dirty low down sins.” Shortly thereafter he had made this devilish statement, he then asked the perspiring congregation for tithes.

Hell is said to smell like burning sulfur and is often referred to in the Bible as “brimstone”, and is a symbol of perpetual torment and destruction. However, Brimstone is just an alternative name for sulfur and the Old French word Sulfur is derived from the Latin sulphur, meaning “to burn”. Brimstone, is derived from the Old English (Saxon) Brenne-stone and is also called, quia igne accenditur;  a stone that burns or a burning stone.

God made it an instrument of his vengeance on the heathen and other delinquents. See Ps. xi. 6; Deut. xxix. 23; and Jude ver. 7 and Isaiah, speaking of the enemies of the church, under the designation of Edom, and their destiny, ch. xxxiv. 9, says,

“And her torrents shall be turned into pitch,
And her dust into sulphur:
And her whole land shall become burning pitch.”

In Job xviii. 15, “Brimstone shall be scattered upon his habitation;” and in Revelation 21:8 we are given clues about the after life and hell in which St. John gives us both the esoteric meaning and alchemical consequences of living in sin or an immoral life  – “But the cowardly, the unbelieving, the vile, the murderers, the sexually immoral, those who practice magic arts, the idolaters and all liars–they will be consigned to the fiery lake of burning sulfur. This is the second death.”

The Lake of Fire and Brimstone signifies the word sulfur, which defines the character of the fire. The word theion translated “brimstone” is exactly the same word theion which means “divine”. The ancients had used brimstone for religious purifications, such as in Homers Odyssey, which it is written; ‘Bring hither fire, and hither sulphur bring To purge the palace ‘ (Homer, Od. xxli. 481 f.). This passage is indicating what occurs alchemically in our bodies (palace or temple) by how we think, live and act.

Those people who live a cowardly, unbelieving, vile, and a sexually immoral life, will die in torment as their Astral Bodies will enter a type of purgatory, or in the bible, a fiery lake of burning sulfur which is a second death. It’s as if the Bible is telling us that our souls actually enter into the chemical of Sulfur, in which it is a type of torment for how we have lived in this life. The great philosopher, Almadir, had written – “We extract our Mercury from one perfect body and two perfect natural conditions incorporated together, which indeed puts forth externally its perfection, whereby it is able to resist the fire, so that its internal imperfection may be protected by the external perfections.”

This is the whole goal with living a righteous, Christ like,or a Buddha type of life. We must learn to resist the fire within, for the serpent in which we need to tame to reach internal imperfection, so that it may be protected by the external perfections. This fire and our passions are fueled by the chemical compound of Sulfur, or what the bible has consigned to Hell via the fiery lake of burning sulfur. Sulphur is the caustic agent that burns away the imperfect matter in order to purify it so we can be self-consciousness with the ability to reason.  Salt is the preservative principle such as in water or our DNA, representing untapped knowledge or an unenlightened state, that is our human storehouse of past lives, knowledge and the subconscious. Mercury represents the illuminated man, the Christ or Buddha who we can call enlightened. When we conquer our passions, desires and the material world, we then become our own Christs, King Solomon’s, Grand Architects of our own temples who live like divine Saints in our own right.

In the book, Hermetic Chemistry (1894) by Paracelsus and author Arthur Edward Waite, it explains this process;

This operation is esteemed by the Magi as a mixture and conjunction by the uniting of three constituents, body, soul, and spirit. When this union is completed there results from it a pure Mercury. Now if this, when flowing down through its subterranean passages and veins, meets with a chaotic Sulphur, the Mercury is coagulated by it according to the condition of the Sulphur.

It is, however, still volatile, so that scarcely in a hundred years is it transformed into a metal. Hence arose the vulgar idea that Mercury and Sulphur are the matter of the metals, as is certainly reported by miners. It is not, however, common Mercury and common Sulphur which are the matter of the metals, but the Mercury and the Sulphur of the philosophers are incorporated and inborn in perfect metals, and in the forms of them, so that they never fly from the fire, nor are they depraved by the force of the corruption caused by the elements.

Our corporeal bodies are animated by the soul. Corporeal means “of the body” and animated means “of the soul” because of “anima”, which is Latin for soul.  Salt is the body made mostly of water and sulphur is the soul that becomes animated by the DNA in which when you properly align or balance these chemical properties in yourself, you can then communicate through the chemical “mercury” that is spirit, which then creates “gold” for the Adept who has found the light or Philosophers Stone. He is in line with the AS ABOVE, SO BELOW and can create on the AS WITHIN, AS WITHOUT.

In Sir Issac Newtons, La Lumiere sortant des Tenebres (The Light Coming forth from the Darkness) he wrote:

The philosophers have given sulfur, or fire, the name gold not for nothing, because it is truly gold both in essence and in substance, but much more perfect than common gold. It is a gold that is completely sulfur, or rather a true sulfur of gold, a gold that is entirely fire, or the true fire of gold that develops; in philosophical caves and mines; a gold that cannot be changed or surpassed by any element, because it is itself the master of elements; a very fixed gold in which is only fixity; a very pure gold, because it is purity itself; a very powerful gold because without it everything else pines away; a balsamy gold, because it preserves all bodies against decomposition; an animal gold because it is the soul of elements of the entire lower nature; a vegetable gold, because it is the principle of the entire vegetation; a mineral gold, because it is sulfury, quicksilvery, and salty; an ethereal gold,

because it is of heavenly nature and it is a true earthly heaven that is veiled by another heaven; finally it is a solar gold, because it is the rightful son of the Sun and the true Sun of Nature; its power gives force to the elements of which the warmth vivifies the souls and of which the movement of the entire Nature is brought into movement; from its influence the power of things arises, because it is the influence of the light, a part of the heavens, the lower Sun and the Light of Nature, without which even science would be blind; without its warmth reason would be stupid; without its rays imagination would be dead; without its influences spirit is sterile; and without its light intellect renaming in eternal darkness.

In Genesis 19, God destroys Sodom and Gomorrah with a rain of fire and brimstone, and in Deuteronomy 29, the Israelites are threatened with the same punishment should they abandon their covenant with God. Elsewhere, divine judgments involving fire and sulfur are prophesied against Assyria (Isaiah 30), Edom (Isaiah 34), Gog (Ezekiel 38), and all the wicked (Psalm 11) and in Isaiah 30:33 – “Topheth has long been prepared; it has been made ready for the king. Its fire pit has been made deep and wide, with an abundance of fire and wood; the breath of the LORD, like a stream of burning sulfur, sets it ablaze.” Then in Revelation 19:20 – “But the beast was captured, and with it the false prophet who had performed the signs on its behalf. With these signs he had deluded those who had received the mark of the beast and worshiped its image. The two of them were thrown alive into the fiery lake of burning sulfur.”

These biblical passages are clear Apocalyptic warnings and esoteric teachings on the alchemical process of the scientific origins of life. Those who have an eye to see and mind to reason will be able to identify these scientific facts. For example the origins of life on earth has been debated by many people throughout history, but more recently there are theories that indicate that the origin of life is set upon the iron–sulfur world theory (metabolism without genetics) that was invented in the 1980s and 1990s by Günter Wächtershäuser, who had proposed a theory that Life started as inorganic chemical cycles (through iron-sulfur clusters) that were not self-limiting.  These energy transference cycles could occur using iron-sulfur clusters. The theory proposes that early life may have formed on the surface of iron sulfide minerals, hence the name and others like William Martin and Michael Russell suggest that the first cellular life forms may have evolved inside alkaline hydrothermal vents at seafloor spreading zones in the deep-sea.

The iron–sulfur world theory reminds me of what we find in 1 Kings 7:23 – Then he made the sea of cast metal. It was round, ten cubits from brim to brim, and five cubits high, and a line of thirty cubits measured its circumference.

Moe

Moe is the founder of GnosticWarrior.com. He is a father, husband, author, martial arts black belt, and an expert in Gnosticism, the occult, and esotericism.